Eileen stared at the computer screen in disbelief, a chill crawling up her spine from just between her shoulder blades to the base of her skull. What had started with her obsessive search for clues to the technology underlying the two missing Gregory devices had taken a nasty turn into a very dark place. If she continued on her current track, the knowledge lurking in that darkness was likely to chew her up and spit her mangled corpse into some Potomac backwater.
Eileen’s problem was that she couldn’t quit. It wasn’t in her nature. It was the reason she’d gotten her doctorate from Caltech when others her age were having sweet sixteen parties.
She’d finished her detailed analysis of the data recorded coming and going from the Gregory USB dongles. The things had provided a listing of every programmable system within a one-kilometer radius. But the information went well beyond anything a hacker could obtain, even with a physical connection to those systems. Somehow the dongles had managed to provide the exact location of every system, down to the nearest millimeter. It was an impossible level of detail, and while Eileen couldn’t yet confirm that degree of accuracy, she’d checked coordinates of several samples. They certainly had sub-meter precision.
Even if she assumed the USB dongles had some unknown and undetectable Wi-Fi signal that could connect to other systems, the location thing stumped her. How? It was as if some sort of futuristic neutrino scan had detected all those systems and recorded their locations before tapping them for information. If technology like that existed, it had to be Rho Project–related.
That led Eileen to perform her own review of the events that had led Admiral Riles to launch Jack Gregory at Los Alamos. If Gregory had stumbled upon it during his investigation, he would have realized certain governments would pay for that kind of technology. Perhaps something on that path held a clue to how those things worked.
It was a path that led her to make use of Big John’s correlative search capabilities. Eileen wasn’t worried about attaining authorization for her initial search. It fell within the span of her forensic examination of the hack that Gregory’s team had pulled off. But with every query, Big John led her farther astray, quickly invalidating her working hypothesis. Worse, she found herself seduced by the quest, her “How?” changed to “Why?”
From what she’d learned, it was clear that Eileen wasn’t the first to snoop this trail. Denise Jennings’s digital fingerprints were everywhere she looked. But Denise’s chain of Big John queries had suddenly ceased. Apparently that train of discovery had finally frightened Denise too badly to continue.
As Eileen looked at the evidence before her, she couldn’t help envy Denise’s good judgment. But now that she’d seen the rabbit disappear down this hole, Eileen had no choice but to follow.
Siena’s Piazza del Campo was almost empty. A few tourists stood atop the fish-bone patterned red bricks, peering over the wrought-iron fence in front of the Gaia Fountain, snapping pictures, applying suntan lotion to pasty white legs, or texting friends who had wandered off to see the Siena Cathedral or one of the medieval Tuscan city’s other tourist destinations.
Heather, as Inga Hedstrom, had been with the Swiss private security firm Paladin for three weeks. Her current assignment involved babysitting Bayad al’Fahd, the yuppie son of a Saudi prince, on his upper Tuscany tour. Not that Bayad didn’t have his own bodyguards. He had a half dozen of them. But young al’Fahd was an important new client of Credit Suisse and the second largest Swiss bank had extended the extra protection as a courtesy. Thus Heather found herself the upper-class equivalent of a new account microwave oven.
Getting hired by Paladin had been the easy part. Inga Hedstrom, a dual US and Swiss citizen, was twenty-nine and 120 pounds, and stood five feet eight inches tall. With her boyishly short blonde hair and blue eyes, only her icy demeanor kept her from being attractive. Jack had created an elaborate black ops profile, including a lot of dead former colleagues who raved about her work in postmortem write-ups. With the ability to infiltrate all the appropriate record systems, she’d had no difficulty ensuring her security clearance and records appeared in all the right places. And since she had left CIA employ six months ago and all her CIA missions were classified and close-hold, they avoided broad scrutiny.
Heather liked being Inga, but she didn’t particularly like this assignment. Once it became clear that she had no interest in doing anything other than her job, Bayad had told her to stay away from his inner circle. Assuming she didn’t know more than cursory Arabic, he had begun laughing it up with two of his biggest bodyguards. Wasn’t it funny that the Swiss bank actually thought this woman could enhance his protection, when all she was fit to enhance was his harem?
On the upside, not being allowed within his inner circle meant she didn’t have to listen to the moron’s views on women, or anything else for that matter. On the downside, she was too far away from Bayad to prevent the attack when it came.
She trailed ten meters behind Bayad’s pack as they approached the string of outdoor eateries lining the piazza’s northwest side. Along the dining area’s right side, two men busily unloaded chairs from the rear of a white van, much to the irate restaurant manager’s dismay. A vision flashed through her brain a second before the vehicle began to move, its wheels laying a thin layer of smoking rubber toward Bayad.
As Heather sprinted forward, pulling the Glock from her shoulder holster, the two chair stackers wheeled, pointing previously concealed MP5 submachine guns toward the group of surprised Saudis. Heather’s first bullet caught the nearest man in the chest, the nine-millimeter Parabellum sending him tumbling onto an adjacent table. But a woman carrying a child blocked her line of fire to the second assassin, enabling him to unleash a fusillade of automatic weapon fire into Bayad’s clustered bodyguards. Heather’s second round struck just above the bridge of his nose, its mist trail giving him a momentary red halo as he fell.
One of the two remaining bodyguards shoved Bayad out of the van’s path, covering his employer with his body as the van slammed into his partner’s rising gun hand, wedging it and the man’s face deep inside the front grill. The passenger door opened away from Heather as she found her view blocked by terrified patrons. As she rounded the rear of the van, she heard a double tap and saw the bleeding bodyguard roll off the wide-eyed Bayad. Seeing the assassin’s trigger finger tighten, she fired again, striking the man’s gun hand as the weapon discharged into the paving stones beside Bayad’s head.
And then she was on him, her kick buckling the assassin’s right knee as she pistol-whipped him across the side of his head. As the big man hit the pavement, the squall of the van’s tires sent Heather diving to her right, shoulder-rolling into a shooter’s crouch in time to see the white van skid into a racing turn, its back doors slamming open as it accelerated away across the piazza. Taking a forty-five-degree angle away from her, it prevented her from getting a clear shot at the driver. Heather put four rounds into the right tires and another four into the white side panel, but if she hit the driver, she couldn’t tell. Skidding around the corner, the van disappeared down Via Casato di Sotto.
Heather ejected the magazine, slapped in a fresh one, and leaned down to check the unconscious assassin. His pulse and the blood matting the hair on the right side of his head told her he wouldn’t be waking up anytime soon. Kicking his pistol away, she did a rapid pat-down, pulled the man’s ankle knife from its sheath, and turned her back on him.
Bayad had scrambled back against one of the tables, pushing the chairs aside until he was half under it, his breath coming in short, hyperventilating gasps. As Heather knelt beside him, the wail of sirens echoed through the streets. Holstering her weapon, she knelt beside the Saudi.
“Mr. al’Fahd. Are you injured?”
“What?”
“Look at me. Are you injured?”
As his eyes focused on her face, a wave of relief washed his features. “No. I don’t think so. Just bruises, Allah be praised.”
Four police cars raced into the piazza, spilling heavily armed blue-and-gray-clad polizia onto the asphalt thirty meters to either side of her. Seeing Heather kneeling beside the seated Bayad, in the midst of so many dead bodies, they advanced with submachine guns leveled.
A loudspeaker blared in Italian. “On your stomach, arms and legs spread. Now!”
Heather flopped facedown, spread-eagled.
Bayad hesitated. “But I...”
The message blared again in heavily accented English.
“Down on your stomach! Arms and legs spread! Do it now!”
Bayad complied.
Immediately Heather felt a knee in her back as a steel handcuff crunched tight around her right hand, then her left, as they were drawn together behind her back. In seconds she was disarmed and thrust in the back of one police car, while Bayad disappeared into another.
Leaning back in her seat, Heather looked out the window as the car sped through the narrow streets.
Memorizing the scenery as she passed it by, she nodded. Siena really was a very lovely city.
Mark wriggled into a crawl space barely wide enough to squeeze his body through, deep into the MINGSTER’s belly. Officially it was called the Matter to Energy Conversion Facility, but nobody besides Dr. Stephenson called it that. It, along with its other end in the ATLAS cavern, was the biggest jumble of electrical wiring and cables on earth, and that didn’t even take into account the cooling required for the superconducting cables. Because of the need for demon speed in construction and the need to minimize the amount of cable through which all that power had to be pushed, everything was placed as close together as possible. It was the thing that made for these tight crawls.
Unfortunately the project’s lead engineer, Gerhardt Werner, had stuck him on the wrong end of the construction. Mark didn’t want to be buried in the MINGSTER. He needed to be working with the crew in the ATLAS cavern. There was a way to get transferred to the other team, but it took time, and that was something he didn’t have much of.
Mark needed to get his team ahead of schedule and make it obvious that he was the reason. The ATLAS crew was already behind; he just had to widen that gap. So Mark worked double shifts. He would have liked to work triple, but working around the clock without sleep would have attracted the wrong kind of attention. Between the double shifts and the speed and quality of his work, he had become the engine propelling the project forward.
In normal times, the union would have tried to put a thumb on him to slow down and quit making others look bad, but these weren’t normal times. So they left the muscular Swede with the Viking beard and long blond mane to himself and his work. That was fine with Mark. He wasn’t here to make friends and drink beer.
As he finished wiring the current section, his favorite music mix thundered in his mind. Mark worked at the one thing he could directly control, confident in the knowledge that by the end of today’s second shift, his crew would be farther ahead of the ATLAS team. Picturing the project leaders, sitting in their meetings, staring at their Gantt charts, he smiled. Soon now, the picture of what he was accomplishing would leap off the page at them. Then his boss would have no choice but to move him to where he should have been all along.
Dr. Peter Trotsky stared as his postdoctoral assistant turned her back on him and headed toward the stairs that would take her up, out of the ATLAS cavern. Dr. Nika Ivanovich was driving him crazy. Perhaps she already had.
When she was on her game, she was by far the most brilliant scientific mind and computer scientist he’d ever known, including that pompous bastard Stephenson. But there were times when Nika was just plain unreliable. Like right now, for instance.
Stephenson had just handed him a list of upgrades he wanted on the stasis field controller software, and he expected the changes to be implemented and tested by this time tomorrow evening. A month’s work in twenty-four hours. But when Peter had shown it to Nika, she’d laughed her seductive laugh and said she’d sleep on it.
The anger had bubbled up inside him, but somehow, as he looked into those blue eyes, he’d gone all warm and fuzzy inside. He’d told her that was a good idea.
A good idea!
Now all he could do was watch the petite young woman in her tight jeans and white Tori Amos T-shirt walk away from him, several spears of her spiked blonde hair aimed straight at his heart. God. He was sixty-five years old, yet somehow this fascinating young woman had him wishing he were thirty again. Shit! Even if he were thirty, he’d never be able to handle a woman like that.
Looking at the sheaf of requirements in his hands, he walked over to the workstation, set the papers under the keyboard, and turned toward the stairs that would carry him up to his own bunk.
“Where are you going?”
Dr. Trotsky turned to face Stephenson. He wasn’t scared of Stephenson, like the others. He’d seen it all before, and knew the type. Nothing he could do would be good enough anyway, so he might as well just do what he thought best.
“First I design, then I code, then I test. Don’t worry. You’ll have your changes on schedule.”
Stephenson scowled at him. “I better.”
Trotsky shook his head, turned, and walked away. What choice did he have? He couldn’t program fast enough to get this done if he worked all week. Only Nika could. He’d just have to hope a fresh Nika could deliver tomorrow’s miracle. Otherwise the trip back to Vladivostok was likely to be unpleasant.